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This unusual group portrait originally hung in Hogarth’s studio where it must have served as an advertisement for the artist’s unrivalled skill in characterisation. The picture consists of a series of unrelated studies. Hogarth has achieved a unified composition through a symmetrical arrangement of the heads and a consistent light source coming from the upper left. Hogarth’s decision to
paint his own servants together, outside the confines of their daily routine is quite unique. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this picture is the collective sense of dignity and humanity displayed by this assemblage of unassuming individuals.

One of Hogarth's most spontaneous and masterly works in portraiture, this sketch represents, according to reliable sources, six servants of the Hogarth household. It is not known who they are individually, but Samuel Ireland (1794, p.169) mentions that the Hogarths had an old servant called Ben Ives, who could be the old man in the top right corner. Mrs Hogarth is also known to have had a servant called Samuel, and a housemaid who was with them at Chiswick, a ‘Mrs Chappel, of Great Smith Street, Westminster’, who lived to be a centenarian well into the nineteenth century. Some of Mrs Chappel's recollections were used in Edward Draper's ‘Memorials of Hogarth’, Pictorial World 26 September 1874 (quoted in Paulson 1971, II, pp.451–2 n.74). The painting may have hung in the artist's studio along with other portraits of his family, and could have served to demonstrate his ability to catch a likeness in all age-groups - indeed, the range of flesh tones represented is remarkable.

Although the informal directness of the group clearly puts it into the category of ‘friendship’ portraits, painted either for the sheer love of painting or out of affection for the people represented, or both, it could also be seen as a realisation in painterly terms of the kind of categorising accumulation of heads and objects that are frequent in Hogarth's graphic work and which aim to express the full range of some given concept, in this case all the facial characteristics from youth to age as in the ‘seven ages of man’, a subject already dealt with by him in the surround of Plate 2 of The Analysis of Beauty, 1753.

It is not possible to date the work exactly, but stylistically it would appear to be fairly late. The beginnings of a seventh head, probably female, have been laid-in in the lower left corner, and the left-hand edge of the young woman's bonnet next to it has been narrowed as if to accommodate it. The left edge of the canvas has been cut, removing half of the oval of the laid-in head. The remaining heads have been brought to a high degree of finish, although their placing on the buff ground makes it clear that the painting was never meant to be taken any further. Compositionally, however, the painting is given an overall unity by all the heads being lit from the same side, and each is loosely paired in the angle from which it is seen with the head above or below. At the same time each maintains its separateness by looking out at its own distinct focal point, and the fact that none of their lines of vision intersect creates a sense of balanced dignity unusual in a painting that makes no apparent claim to being a formal composition.

The painting is first mentioned by Nichols in 1782, who, when commenting on Hogarth's good relations with his servants, states: ‘of most of these he painted a strong likeness on a canvas still in Mrs Hogarth's possession’. It was bought at the sale of her collection in 1790 (according to Horace Walpole's annotated copy of the catalogue, published in the Burlington Magazine, LXXXV, 1944) by ‘Clarke of the Strand’. As Nichols & Steevens name the owner of the painting in 1810 as ‘William Collins Esq, of Greenwich’, and state in the subsequent (1817) volume that he had bought it at Mrs Hogarth's sale, it is likely that Clarke was his agent. The lender to the 1833 exhibition is mentioned only as ‘Collins’, so that it could be the same owner, or his descendant. After this the painting reappears in the 1879 sale of the stock-in-trade of the late William Benoni White, dealer in Brownlow Street, Holborn, where it had apparently ‘remained for the last sixteen years since his retirement from business’ (Redford 1888, quoting The Times, 28 May 1879).

Dobson records (Illustrated London News, 1892) that among the volumes of papers formerly owned by Hogarth's patron James Caulfield, 1st Earl of Charlemont, then currently on sale at Quaritch's, was a pencildrawing of this painting, signed with the initials of the etcher Richard Livesay, dated 1788, and entitled ‘Hogarth's Servants’. As Livesay was Mrs Hogarth's lodger at Leicester Square and produced many facsimiles after Hogarth's drawings for her, this seems reliable evidence, although no etching seems to have been produced after this drawing.

Published in:Elizabeth Einberg and Judy Egerton, The Age of Hogarth: British Painters Born 1675-1709, Tate Gallery Collections, II, London 1988